The influential feminist art center was founded in 1973 by Judy Chicago, Sheila de Bretteville, and Arlene Raven. It gave women a space to experiment and learn, housing the first independent school for women artists.

Read more and hear from some of the artists involved in the project in this Hyperallergic feature.

According to Frieze, although many historical female artists have recently gained recognition through an increase in temporary exhibitions, museums are failing to take steps toward achieving gender parity in their permanent collections.

American Theatre highlights 10 plays by women of color currently running Off-Broadway.

The Eternal Thread, Louise Bourgeois’s first major exhibition in China, is on view at the Long Museum in Shanghai. The show weaves together seven decades of the artist’s diverse body of work, highlighting her incredible ability to “investigate the power of materials…to connect the present and the past.”

Sara Cwynar’s first museum show, Image Model Muse, is at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. Cwynar’s work often deals with issues related to capitalism, prompting ARTnews to tout her as an artist who is “attuned to the rush of advertising and persuasion that now flows through screens and feeds.”

—Becca Gross is the fall 2018 publications and marketing/communications intern at the National Museum of Women in the Arts.

Hyperallergicspotlights Escape to Berlin, the new memoir of conceptual artist and philosopher Adrian Piper.

Jenny Holzer has created a mobile art exhibition “illuminating the words of activists, poets, artists, educators and people living with H.I.V. and AIDS,” which will tour New York City on World AIDS Day, December 1.

Natalie White, Carrie Mae Weems, and Shirin Neshat are among several artists creating work for Planned Parenthood’s UNSTOPPABLE campaign.

Shows We Want to See

Disrupting Craft: Renwick Invitational 2018, on view in Washington, D.C., features the work of two women artists whose socially engaged craft responds to the current sociopolitical landscape. Tanya Aguiñiga creates work related to gender and nationality. “Craftivist” Stephanie Syiuco deals with concepts of authenticity, consumerism, and digital culture. In a recent interview with Art21, Syiuco discusses her attempts to process the world using a combination of craft and digital platforms.

U.K.-based Portuguese artist Paula Rego is the subject of an exhibition at the Musee de l’Orangerie in Paris. Apollo Magazine describes the show’s “narrative twists that transform the everyday into the fantastic.”

The Jewish Museum presents Martha Rosler: Irrespective, which illuminates more than five decades of work by the artist and activist. As curator Darsie Alexander told Art Daily, Rosler’s art continues to be “a call to action.”

—Becca Gross is the fall 2018 publications and marketing/communications intern at the National Museum of Women in the Arts.

Both artists, who are often considered female Surrealists, were actually quite resistant to such labels. Tanning famously said, “Women artists. There is no such thing… It’s just as much a contradiction in terms as ‘man artist’ or ‘elephant artist.’” Similarly, Fini, was a vocal critic of Surrealism’s misogynistic tendencies.

The Boston Ballet has begun its new ChoreograpHER Initiative, which aims to “support and develop female choreographers” in the historically male-dominated field.

Shows We Want to See

In an effort to “combat stereotypes and dominant narratives,” the Brooklyn Museum presents Half the Picture: A Feminist Look at the Collection. The exhibition displays more than 100 of the museum’s artworks through an intersectional feminist lens. Aesthetica Magazine calls the show “a direct response to the crucial social and political issues that have dominated the global conversation in the past year.”

A retrospective of photographs by Martine Franck is on view at the newly opened Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson (Paris). Franck’s images documented the political and the social, capturing life during her travels in the latter half of the 20th century.

Firelei Báez: Joy Out of Fire at Harlem’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture vibrantly highlights the accomplishments of “women activists, writers, artists, and politicians of color.”

The Modernist, on view at Lehmann Maupin gallery (NYC), includes Catherine Opie’s first work of film accompanied by a series of photographs chronicling the exploits of a fictional arsonist named Pig Pen. The queer figure fearlessly burns down “structures that reflect such exclusive [white male] privilege.”

—Becca Gross is the fall 2018 publications and marketing/communications intern at the National Museum of Women in the Arts.

Researcher Sarah Bochicchio points out that while female Impressionists Mary Cassatt and Berthe Morisot have had major solo shows in 2018, Bracquemond continues to remain relatively unknown. The article sheds needed light on this under-recognized member of the “three great ladies of Impressionism.”

Front-Page Femmes

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has urged her country to “improve the standing of women in the arts [by ensuring] balanced award-giving juries and grant bodies.”

Researchers at Indiana University Bloomington are creating a comprehensive online database of female artists active in the U.S. and Europe from the 15th to 19th centuries.

Though only three are women, the four-person curatorial team for the 2020 Berlin Biennale has stated, “we identify as female because we feel the rule of everything by overconfident-macho voices must end.”

Priscilla Frank of The Huffington Post discusses the sometimes troubling associations drawn between female creativity and the occult. In her investigation, she examines Amazon’s recent remake of the 1977 horror film Suspiria and Hilma af Klint’s current Guggenheim retrospective Paintings forthe Future.

Mickalene Thomas discusses the way photography became the “center of her practice” at a luncheon honoring the accomplishments of women in film and photography.

Nan Goldin and Catherine Opie are among several artists selling signed prints in a five-day sale organized by Magnum Photos. Proceeds from Goldin’s sales will go to her activist group P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now).

BAMcinématek in Brooklyn is presenting a film series highlighting the “overlooked work of women in the domestic space.”

Betye Saar: Keepin’ It Clean goes on view at the New-York Historical Society today. The 92-year-old black feminist icon hopes the exhibition will convince America to “clean up its act” regarding politics and actions.

The Guardian profiles a new exhibition on view at England’s Nottingham Contemporary. Still I Rise: Feminisms, Gender, Resistance features 40 women and non-binary artists whose work examines the ways in which women combat oppression. In an effort to present a fresh perspective on the topic, the curators of the show have “ditched typical exhibiting systems and hierarchies to allow feminist and intersectional queer thought to direct everything from the ground up.”

Patricia Cronin, Aphrodite, and the Lure of Antiquity reimagines classical mythology through a distinctly feminist lens. Part of the Tampa Museum of Art’s Conversations with the Collection series, the show is based around artist Patricia Cronin’s encounters with museum’s holdings of ancient Aphrodite imagery. The result is an exhibition that “erases the bias of the original myth and replaces it with an icon absolutely appropriate for contemporary women.”

—Becca Gross is the fall 2018 publications and marketing/communications intern at the National Museum of Women in the Arts.

Artsy presents a short film highlighting the work and influence of artist Carrie Mae Weems.

Julia Louis-Dreyfus became the sixth woman to win the Mark Twain Prize, considered the highest honor in comedy.

The National Gallery in London released a video interview with the writers of It’s True, It’s True, It’s True, a new play inspired by Renaissance artist Artemisia Gentileschi, whose Lucretia was auctioned at a record-breaking $2.1 million sale on Tuesday.

NPR interviews Jill Soloway about their hit show Transparent and their new memoir She Wants It: Desire, Power and Toppling the Patriarchy.

IMMA in Dublin opens a major retrospective on Mary Swanzy, a historically under-recognized painter whom they hope to “reinstate as a Modern Irish Master.”

Paintings from the Future, a retrospective of the spiritual and abstract work of Hilma af Klint, is on view at the Guggenheim Museum. Ben Davis of artnet news dubs af Klint “the perfect artist for our technologically disrupted time,” claiming that her colorful canvases will make you “rethink what it means to be modern.”

Four decades of work by photographer Laurie Simmons is on view at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth in Texas in Big Camera/Little Camera. Critic Linda Yablonsky says, “This game-changing year feels exactly right for Simmons as a feminist, social commentator, and above all, a colourist.”

—Becca Gross is the fall 2018 publications and marketing/communications intern at the National Museum of Women in the Arts.

Fates and Furies author Lauren Groff publishes a short-story collection titled Florida. The New Yorker calls her work “a chaotic blurring or collapsing of the real and the imaginary.” NPR interviews Groff.

Artist Lindsey French’s work is a “multi-faceted collaboration with the natural world, giving voice to the photosynthetic, and openly conspiring with the notorious poison ivy.”

A week after turning 40, the American Ballet Theater principal dancer Stella Abrera will dance the lead in “Romeo and Juliet.”

Half Gods, Akil Kumarasamy’s début collection of interconnected stories, “doubles as a chilling history lesson for readers unfamiliar with the bloody conflict between Sri Lanka’s Tamils, a northern minority, and its Sinhalese majority.”

Women Photograph Dalí features works by women artists who were well-known photojournalists, as well as artists who were known as patrons, art dealers, or supporters of their better-known husbands. The exhibition is on view at the Gala–Salvador Dalí Foundation’s Púbol Castle in Catalonia, Spain.

Carmen Winant’s My Birth (2018) is on view as part of Being: New Photography 2018 at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Hyperallergic writes, “Winant directly addresses our general discomfort with the physical aspect of childbirth, forcing viewers to look directly at it, the universal starting point.”

The exhibition Georgia O’Keeffe: Visions of Hawai’i did not include O’Keeffe’s painting Hibiscus (1939), one of 20 works that O’Keeffe painted while in Hawaii. The painting has since resurfaced, selling for $4.8 million at auction.

Amy Sherald’s solo show at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis is on view through August 19. In an interview with Hyperallergic, Sherald reflects on her work and says, “…it’s nice to come into a space and see yourself expressed gently and just being able to sit with that.”

Carissa Rodriguez: The Maid presents two video works and a series of photo-based works, on view at MIT List Visual Arts Center in Massachusetts.

Berthe Morisot: Woman Impressionist at the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec will feature more than 50 paintings. The exhibition includes a painting by Morisot from NMWA’s collection.

—Emily Haight is the digital editorial associate at the National Museum of Women in the Arts.

On Tuesday, after nearly nine decades, Zora Neale Hurston’s story of a former slave was finally published.

When Hurston interviewed Cudjo Lewis in 1927, he was the last known living person who could recount first-hand the experience of having been taken captive in Africa and transported on a slave ship to the U.S.

Author Tayari Jones describes Hurston’s Barracoon: The Story of the Last ‘Black Cargo as a “recovered masterpiece.” The Washington Postexplores how Hurston’s story was blocked from publication by copyright protections. “Copyright laws rewritten by major corporations to preserve income from nearly century-old creations have all but erased a generation of less famous writers and unknown works by well-known writers.”

Diana Al-Hadid’s first major public art project, Delirious Matter, will be installed in Madison Square Park.

Artists and curators comment on the Baltimore Museum of Art’s decision to diversify its collection through recent acquisitions of works by women and artists of color and by deaccessioning repetitive works.

art21 films Valeska Soares working on her “Doubleface” series, in which the artist reworks 19th- and 20th-century portraits of women.

An early painting by Yayoi Kusama is expected to sell for between ten and seven million dollars—which would set a new record.

Ghada Amer’s work is “an iron fist in a velvet glove,” writes Hyperallergic.

“I’m way more influenced by my children than I was by my parents,” says Simmons. “At the risk of sounding like a big fat cliché, they’re my teachers now. They’re my conduit to the 21st century.” Simmons’s work is currently on view in the NMWA exhibition Women House.

Front-Page Femmes

Zadie Smith profiles Deana Lawson through a close examination of her powerful photographs.

In June, the Clark Art Institute opens two new exhibitions featuring women artists. Women Artists in Paris, 1850–1900showcases work by well-known artists, including Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassatt, alongside artists less recognizable to US audiences, such as Louise Breslau and Anna Ancher. The museum will also showcase six immersive projections by Los Angeles-based media and installation artist Jennifer Steinkamp.

—Emily Haight is the digital editorial associate at the National Museum of Women in the Arts.

The Guardian writes, “The sculptures that adorn our public spaces matter. It is time for women—and not just the semi-naked women who are sculpted as allegories for Justice or Peace—to become part of the grammar of our streets.” The BBC explains that less than 3% of statues in the United Kingdom are of women.

Front-Page Femmes

Turner Prize-winning artist Lubaina Himid requests that galleries showing her work reach out to black artists nearby to include in programs alongside her exhibitions.

New York Magazine’s The Cut explores questions surrounding the nude female form as a subject for male artists in an article titled “Who’s Afraid of the Female Nude?”

The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago announced the first ever winner of the Dunya Contemporary Art Prize, which aims to increase exposure for Middle Eastern artists. The winner, Qatari-American artist Sophia Al-Maria, received $100,000 and a new MCA commission.

Ethiopian artist Aïda Muluneh subverts stereotypes of Africa perpetuated by Western media. “I’m trying to share my heritage but also to show the universality of people around the world,” says Muluneh. Her photography is currently on view at the Museum of Modern Art.

In an interview with Apollo Magazine, artist Huma Bhabha discusses her large-scale bronze sculptures installed on the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Cantor Roof.

Corita Kent: Get With The Action is on display at Ditchling Museum of Art + Craft in England. “We live in a time when popular action seems complicated and confusing; and Kent’s simple, heartfelt message rings down the decades,” writes the Guardian.

—Emily Haight is the digital editorial associate at the National Museum of Women in the Arts.